Grassroots News & Progressive Views

Author Steven Singer shares a hoary story that has become a national crisis. Unlike a Steven King novel, this book, Gadfly on the Wall, is not a fantasy. It is impossible to overstate the damage being done to America and its children by the greedy, the self-centered and the stupid. They are set on destroying free universal public education in America.

Billionaires be wary, Singer says he is ready to kick your sorry asses.

Many people were disheartened when Donald Trump became president and installed an evangelical who despises public schools as Secretary of Education. Her agenda seems to be ending public education and creating a system of government financed Christian schools. Here, I really love Singer’s attitude. He says:

“We lived through administrations that wanted to destroy us and actually knew how to do it! We can take Tiny Hands, the Bankruptcy King any day! This is a guy who couldn’t make a profit running casinos – a business where the house always wins! You expect us to cower in fear that he’s going to take away our schools. Son, we’ve fought better than you!”

I first met the author of The Gadfly on the Wall at Chicago’s Drake Hotel almost three years ago. Educators, parents and others were arriving for the National Public Education (NPE) conference. The Drake’s lobby waiting area is at the top of a short flight of stairs next to the room where hi-tea has been served since the 19th Century. It was here that I met Karen Wolfe from LA, Larry Profit from Tennessee, Singer from Pennsylvania and many others. [Read more…]

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“Arizona banned our history. We decided to make more.”

By Anna Daniels

Editor Note: So here’s some good news in 2017–a Federal judge declared Arizona’s ban on Mexican-American ethnic studies unconstitutional. The legal battle took seven years, which goes to show that sustained resistance + access to legal remedies = progressive wins. The following article was published in 2014.

If you can ban one book, why not ban a whole bunch of them? Back in 2012 the Tucson Arizona public school system embraced the more is better approach when it eliminated the Mexican American Studies Program from the K-12 curriculum.

The LA Times reported that “The Tucson school board voted to end the program after Arizona’s education chief had ruled the district in violation of a controversial state law banning classes designed for a particular ethnic group or that “promote the overthrow of the U.S. government.” The Tuscon school district stood to lose $14 million in state education funds, which no doubt squelched a more robust debate on the topic of intellectual freedom and education.

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As the year end approaches, it’s seems natural to reflect on where we’ve been, where we’re going and why we are here. Ferlinghetti has given us one perspective with his “I Am Waiting” from A Coney Island of the Mind.[Read more…]

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If you just can’t bring yourself to give up on the sordid consumer frenzy and go all in for a Buy Nothing Christmas, then perhaps getting your loved ones a few good books to help them navigate our dark times is the next best thing.

Here is my list of a handful of some of the best books of the last awful year:Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America by Nancy MacLeanNo is Not Enough: Resisting Trump’s Shock Politics and Winning the World We Need by Naomi KleinThoreau, A Life by Laura Dassow WallsNew York 2140 by Kim Stanley Robinson

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For those of us in California, the older industrial belt of the Midwest including Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio, and western Pennsylvania, is a world away from us regarding immigration issues. Our state is doing what it can to protect its immigrants from attacks from the Trump administration. But if we want good national immigration reform anytime soon, what happens in upcoming election cycles in the Midwest is very important.

The Republican Party has bought the Trump base with its anti-immigrant, nativist politics that only grow more rabid by the day. The only path to improve national immigration laws in the near future is through the Democratic Party winning back the Congress in 2018 or 2020 on a platform of inclusion.

While President Trump was elected by a majority of white voters in every popular category, it was the white “swing” voters in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, who had voted for Obama in 2008 and 2012, that were a surprising part of Trump’s narrow margin of victory in those states last year.